Inside Bush's Diary: Lame Ducks & Lame Dems

Inside Bush's Diary: Lame Ducks & Lame
Dems

These final months are
not fun. The economy is a disaster. My ratings have sunk
even deeper into the toilet. Congress, sensing my lame-duck
weakness, has started over-riding my vetoes. Republican
candidates are staying away from me like I'm toxic waste.
The Democrats are licking their lips, already tasting
victory in November.

(But, lucky for us, the Democrat
leaders are still wimps and aren't really coming after us in
the White House. Karl was right: Make the Democrats
complicit in the Iraq War and on domestic spying and on
tax-cuts, economic bailouts, etc; with the Dems locked into
our policies, at least tangentially, on those issues, they
won't dare come at us frontally or they'll go down along
with us. I love the beltway!)

There's not much for me to
do around here, so mostly I'm just officiating at numerous
ceremonial events, using the bully pulpit on occasion, and
traveling around the globe saying my goodbyes. Most of the
world leaders seem to be tolerating me, but with no great
warmth, almost as if they're happy I'm departing the scene.
Can that really be true?

The Vice President continues to
more or less run the show, with his CoC Addington doing the
heavy lifting and providing the ideological underpinnings.
In short, Dick's got himself an even-better Libby. Cheney
seems to have every neo-con in Washington on his staff or
under his control -- what an operation! (The GOP may pay a
price in November for my having commuted Libby's sentence,
but it was important that he not go to prison so that all
our closest former advisers, especially Alberto, would get
the message: Keep your mouth shut and, if it comes to that,
we'll take care of you with a full pardon.)

Mukasey is,
like his A.G. predecessor, a good little lap dog. He knows
what he was appointed to do: Make sure nobody even gets
close to putting us in the federal slammer for what we've
done, or makes us liable for "war crimes" prosecutions in
The Hague.

So the name of the game now is delay, delay,
delay, drag out any possible hope for full congressional
investigations of our activities, even if the Dems were to
be so inclined. So we make sure our guys don't show up to
testify before their committees, or don't submit the
subpoenaed documents, or we claim "executive privilege," or
file endless briefs in court to postpone decisions, etc.
Such delaying tactics, obvious to the public or not, do
work.

THANKS BE TO KARL

The Democrat leaders
are pissed off that we're thumbing our noses at them and not
giving them many openings to attack us, but they're just not
willing to take any decisive action against us, even when
they hold our folks in "contempt of Congress." I mean, the
Dems could, if they wanted to, just order their Sergeants of
Arms from the House and Senate to compel appearances before
the hearing committees and production of the incriminating
documents -- and if our guys don't comply, arrest them.
Instead, we'll just slide on through to January 20, home
free. It's all political theater. I love American
politics!

And -- thank you, Karl! -- we made sure to have
our guy sworn in as U.S. Attorney for the D.C. district, and
he simply won't bring any "contempt" charges before a grand
jury or permit any effective legal action to be taken
against any of us. Is this a great country, or what?

Of
course, having gotten rid of less-than-"loyal-Bushie" U.S.
Attorneys and replacing them with reliable substitutes, Karl
remains in grave legal jeopardy. Along with his involvement
in, how shall we say, some "irregularities" in the counting
of votes. But here, too, I think we can delay and delay to
keep any resolution of the legal matters in limbo. If,
despite our best efforts, it looks bad for Karl prior to
when I leave office, I'll pre-emptively blanket-pardon him
and whoever else looks vulnerable "for any crimes they may
or may not have committed." Don't see why this should
present a problem: My dad did it to get Iran-Contra figures
off the hook -- most notably Sec. of Defense Cap Weinberger
-- before they were indicted, so why not?

PLAYING
THE ELECTION GAME

Meanwhile, the general election
campaign is well under way, even months before the
conventions ratify the candidates. It doesn't look good for
our side: Republicans are simply unpopular, no getting
around that fact, and Obama is an attractive, energized
candidate with Big Ideas (on the economy, on global warming,
on foreign policy, etc.) running against a guy who's
flip-flopping on the major issues like a fish out of water.
No wonder our fundamentalist base is suspicious of him.
Plus, diary, I really wonder about McCain's age; I've met
him on numerous occasions and sometimes he reminds me of
Ronald Reagan in his later years, when his brain-engine
wasn't firing on all cylinders, if you get my drift.

Just
one example: The other day, he attacked Social Security --
not just how that popular program is run but the whole idea
for its existence -- as if he was arguing against its
passage in 1935! In addition, McCain doesn't seem to have a
clue how to stop the American economy from tumbling over the
recessionary cliff -- neither do any of the rest of us, for
that matter, so I don't blame him too much. Too many
negatives are coming to a head at the same time: the
mortgage mess, the credit crunch, the price of gas, the
banks failing, too much built-in debt, the humongous costs
of the War on Terror, etc. Gotta find some way to blame it
all on Bill Clinton.

Right now, it looks like it's Obama's
race to lose, but Karl and his followers are hard at work
trying to alter the odds: removing hundreds of thousands of
likely Democrat voters from the rolls in key states,
contacting our friends who control the vote-counting
software for a little extra hand up, getting Swiftboat-type
PACs set up to question Obama's patriotism, experience,
character, even his religious identity -- and, of course, to
remind a lot of voters, especially in the Old South, that
you just can't trust those people. You know what I mean,
diary, and so do a lot of those voters even if we have to
speak in code.

We also have to constantly "catapult" the
idea (in subtle ways, of course) that all the Islams are a
more or less monolithic race, to be suspected of evil
intent, and that the U.S. is engaged in a holy "crusade" --
I can say that openly to you, diary! -- to save Western,
Judeo-Christian civilization. In short, all Muslims are
potential terrorists. Keep the citizenry frightened. And tie
Obama (keep pounding the "secret Muslim" idea) into that
fear as well.

Karl figures that with our control of the
major mass-media outlets, and with all the Swiftboat-type
PACs out there, we have a shot at painting Obama into a
non-electable corner. We control the framing and the
mass-media parrots the message, no matter how much we
stretch the facts. It's worked virtually every time we try
it, so I say go for it big time for this
election.

RUMINATING ON LEGACY

Despite all
the negative aspects accompanying our rule, there are a lot
of potential positives. The election is only four months
away, and a lot can happen in the interim. There just might
be a terrorist attack -- who knows? -- which could drive
more voters our way. Or an attack on Iran might have to be
launched, and it would be rally-'round-the-flag time. Or we
can defang the Iraq War as an issue by withdrawing tens of
thousands of U.S. troops before the November election -- you
know, make it seem like the beginning of the end -- and then
put them back into Iraq after the election.

I've been
thinking a lot about my legacy. I used to believe that maybe
I could finesse a way of looking good on the global warming
issue, but, even if I had wanted to do something positive in
the past eight years, that train long ago left the station.
(Damn Al Gore!) No, it seems clear to me that the only hope
I've got for a positive legacy is if I can pull a rabbit out
of the hat in the Greater Middle East: Maybe get something
positive out of Iran. Maybe work a deal with Syria. Maybe
something we can point to as "peace" between the Israelis
and Palestinians or some milestone that we can call a
"victory" in Iraq and start (or at least appear to be
starting) to pull our forces out of there.

We might even
be able to massage Maliki's endorsement of Obama's 16-month
timetable so that it redounds to our favor: We could have
McCain say something like: "The surge, which I was for and
Obama was against, has worked so well that our victory
allows us to speed up bringing the boys home" -- that sort
of thing. Of course, the goal here is not really to bring
the troops home but to arrange for us to stay there in some
military strength for decades, using Iraq as our base of
operations for changing the geopolitical map of the Greater
Middle East. But, as I say, we can rework the arrangement
after the November election.

I know all this is a gamble,
though. In the short term we're probably not going to get
more pro-American, capitalist democracies in the region. But
maybe history will prove my policies correct in the long
term and, like Truman, I'll look better from a few decades
out. At this stage, I'll take whatever I can get.

Besides,
there's an upside to all the chaos and catastrophe we're
leaving in our wake for the next president, both
domestically and abroad: Even if he wants to make radical
changes in direction, we will have made sure he's hogtied to
current policies and thus might well fail, making it easier
for a GOP comeback in 2010 and 2012.

Still, I figure if
Dick and I can get out of Washington in January without
being impeached, indicted, or further humiliated, I'll count
that as a big success and, at the very least, a good start
on my legacy.

Copyright 2008, by Bernard
Weiner

*************

Bernard
Weiner, a poet, playwright and Ph.D. in government &
international relations, has peeked into a good many politicians' diaries; he has taught at
various universities in California and Washington, worked as
a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two
decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis
Papers (www.crisispapers.org). T o comment: crisispapers@hotmail.com.

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